THAT'S FIERCE: NONHUMAN PASSAGES IN LATINX-AMERICAN POETRY AND PERFORMANCE.

Abstract

THAT’S FIERCE: NONHUMAN PASSAGES IN LATINX AMERICAN POETRY AND PERFORMANCE. Lacie Rae Buckwalter Cunningham, Ph. D. Cornell University 2017 This dissertation engages with U.S. Latinx and Latin American texts through critical theories of the nonhuman as a way of reconsidering the boundaries of Man and of how this might reframe our literary pursuits. In my approach, I focus on the connections and disconnections between emergent poetic, Latinx, Latin@American voices, and Hispanic literary production. Specifically, I look at how often marginalized voices represent and rearticulate both the limits of the human form and their relationship to ideas of canon through nonhuman interlocutors. I suggest that nonhuman figures which transcend the porous perimeters of the human function as figures of passage between ontologies of selves and literary icons. Nonhuman interlocutors and intensities help us to approach reading between the Americas and amongst figures of man in elliptical motions. In my first chapter, “Natalie Diaz, Duende, and Dreamtigers,” I center references to canonical interventions from Federico García Lorca and Jorge Luis Borges as read through nonhuman figures in Diaz’ When My Brother Was an Aztec. “Collaging Kingdoms,” my second chapter, focuses on Aracelis Girmay’s passages between ideas of blackness, hispaneity, and human-nonhuman collages of self-portraiture. Works from latinx Appalachian poets Maurice Kilwein Guevara and Ada Limón comprises the third chapter, which troubles how nonhuman landscapes can destabilize readings of periphery and performances of the nonhuman. Chapter Four, “How to Read in a River Without Water Damage” engages Basia Irland’s frozen performances which deforms the idea of texts through the environments of water, which shape and redirect their readings with poetic interventions from Milk and Filth by Carmen Giménez Smith. This final chapter troubles the limits of an approach to reading through nonhuman forms that are neither purely inside language, nor outside of it.